UPDATE 08/14/2004:

After almost 6 years of use, I am retiring my ProStar 3203T!

Click here to read my thoughts about the
ProStar 3203T as I finally retire it.

Introduction

I bought this computer primarily to run Linux, and primary for use on long
train/airplane trips. Having previously owned a few older 486 notebooks,
I already had some idea of the things that were important to me. First and
foremost, I wanted a machine with a good, readable display with as many
pixels on the screen as possible. 800x600 was just not going to cut it
for me, therefore my choice of laptops was limited to those which had a
13.3 or 14.1 inch display. The second most important criteria for me
was battery life. I did not want a laptop which got less than 2 hours
per battery, and my target was 2 and a half hours per battery. I decided
that if I could get a laptop which lasted at least 2 and a half hours per
battery, then I'd buy two batteries for a total of at least 5 hours.

Notice that processor speed, amount of memory, hard disk size, etc, were
not on my list of top concerns. I find the
K6-233 in my desktop system to
be more than adequate for my needs, and since new laptops generally feature
an Intel Tillamook 266 processor at minimum,
I knew that anything I looked at was likely to have more than enough
processor horsepower. In fact, I felt more strongly that the processor
I get not run at too fast a clock rate because I was worried that a high
clockrate processor would use too much battery.

Similarly for memory; almost all of the laptops I was looking at had at
least 32 megs of RAM, which I know from experience to be sufficient for
my needs. And I know that 64 is ideal; going from 64 to 128 megs in
my desktop machine made no noticeable difference in performance.

As far as hard disk space goes, I thought that the 2.1 gigs offered as
a baseline on most laptop systems would be adequate but perhaps just a
little restrictive. Therefore I felt that I would probably upgrade to
a larger hard drive if the price was not too prohibitive.

Finally, I was looking for something under $2100 or so.

After alot of browsing on the web for information on laptops I finally
started zeroing in on a few systems, including ProStar's offerings.

A friend suggested I check eBay.com
to look for a good price on laptop systems, and while doing so I ran
into a auction in which one of ProStar's 15.1 inch notebooks was on
offer; I wrote to the seller and asked if I could purchase ProStar
laptops from him directly rather than going through eBay. He
responded that I could, and eventually we agreed upon a very good
price on the laptop I wanted. If you are looking to buy a ProStar
laptop I would recommend that you go with
the source that I used.

If you are in the market for a notebook computer, you will as of this
writing (12/6/1998) find that your choices for processor will mostly
be limited to Intel's
Pentium II and
AMD's K6-2. There
are a few systems out there which claim to offer the Intel Tillamook
processor, which is Intel's mobile version of the Pentium MMX, but I
have been told by at least one notebook company that the Tillamook has
been discontinued and will be very hard to find.

Some companies claim to support first generation AMD K6 processors in
their laptops, although sometimes an advertisement will state something
like "AMD K6 300 3D processor" when they really mean the K6-2. At any rate,
I've heard that the K6 is a poor choice for laptops (as is the regular
Pentium) because of the amount of electricity they use and the amount
of heat they generate.

So, the choice comes down to AMD K6-2 vs. Intel Pentium II. I found
that at any given clock rate, notebooks with the K6-2 were roughly
$200 less expensive than their Pentium II counterparts. Given that
the K6-2 has at least 80% the performance of the same clock
rate Pentium II, the K6-2 looks like the far better buy. I did some
research on the K6-2 because I was worried about power consumption of
the processor given the reputation of the K6, and this is what I found:
the K6-2 is actually more energy efficient than the Pentium II at
clock rates up to and including 300 Mhz. This is because the K6-2 is
manufactured using a .25 micron process at all clock rates, whereas
the Pentium II is manufactured at .28 micron for 300 Mhz and below.
Above 300 Mhz the Pentium II is also at .25 micron so I expect the
difference in power usage between the K6-2 and Pentium II above 300 Mhz to be
negligable.

That pretty much sealed the deal for me - I knew I was going with
AMD.

Update: I have recently been informed that one significant
difference between the AMD and PII versions of this Kapok notebook
computer is that the AMD versions come with the Intel TX chipset
in the motherboard which means that you can only cache 64
MB of RAM with the AMD processor version of this notebook.
The AMD version (socket 7) is the Kapok 1100; the Pentium II
version is the Kapok 1100M and it comes with the Intel BX
chipset which will cache more than 64 MB of memory. This was
not a problem for me since I will not be putting more memory
in the system but it would be a problem for those who want
more than 64 MB.

About Windows

I wrote to ProStar after they had already received my order to ask if
I could get my laptop without
Microsoft Windows, and
save the $50 or so Microsoft Tax, but I
never received a reply. It would have been nice to have not paid for Windows, but
since I knew I was going to be putting Windows on anyway (just for games) I can't
complain too loudly about this. If you are intending to go Linux-only
then I recommend you contact the company you are buying from to ask if
you can get it with no OS. They probably won't do it, but you might get
lucky.

My Configuration

I went with a ProStar 3203T model with an AMD K6-2 300 Mhz processor,
a 14.1 inch TFT display, 64 Megs SDRAM, a 4.2 Gig hard drive, and
two Smart Lithium Ion batteries ("Smart" means, as far as I can tell,
that the battery is able to report what percentage of total charge
it has left).

I paid $1875 + $40 S&H for this configuration, for a total of $1915
delivered to my door, through
Steve Scholz at Cyber
Business Solutions.
I sent Steve a cashier's check on Wednesday 11/18/1998, which he
received on Friday 11/20/1998, and he placed the order with ProStar
the same day. As Thanksgiving was the following week I was told by
Steve to expect the laptop on the week after that. On Monday of the
week after Thanksgiving I called ProStar and asked if my order had
been shipped; I was told that it had and that it would take about
10 days from the time that they shipped it to make it to New York
City from Los Angeles via UPS ground. Sure enough, on Friday 12/4/1998,
I received the laptop, exactly 2 weeks after it had been ordered from
ProStar by Steve, or about 8 business days given the Thanksgiving
holiday.

I was kind of worried about the quality of the laptop given that
I was going with a lesser known brand (ProStar) rather than one
of the "big boys" - Compaq, Toshiba, Sony, Dell, Hitachi, etc.
But I had a very good experience with the quality of my first
laptop (an Intel 486 DX-2 66 with 16 megs of RAM, a 340 meg
hard disk, and a really awful greyscale single-scan display, which I
bought in 1994 for $2,700 !!!), which was an Acom Patriot 4000 (or
was it 2000?) so I knew that non-"name brand" laptops could be of good
quality, I just didn't know how ProStar would compare. Which brings
me to ...

The Arrival

The notebook arrived in a cardboard box very similar in size to that
of a mid-tower desktop case. Inside I found the notebook itself in a
plastic bag, suspended in a foam and cardboard chassis to protect it
during shipping. Also included was the carrying bag, in a separate
compartment. Inside the bag I found the manuals and driver floppies
and CD-ROM, my extra battery, and the Windows 98 manual and CD-ROM. I
was very relieved about this last part as I knew I was going to be
repartitioning and re-installing Windows and I was afraid that the laptop
would not come with the Windows CD-ROM. I personally believe that any
laptop seller which does not include the CD-ROM for the copy of
Windows that you bought with the machine is cheating you, and
I would have made a phone call to ProStar had I not found it. But
like I said, it was there already, and its inclusion was just the first
indication of the high quality of the product.

My first impression was the the notebook was very "generic" looking.
Aside from some funky moldings at the two back corners of the base, which
house the speakers, the laptop is very sleek looking and quite understated.
I was amused to find that there are no brand labels on the laptop anywhere.
The only label on the case simply reads "Notebook". I guess that ProStar
doesn't bother to tag their notebooks with their logo, which I actually
appreciate. I am very proud to own a completely generic notebook.

In fact, in examining the user's manual which comes with the machine I
noticed that there is no mention of ProStar or even Kapok (the manufacturer
of the notebook) anywhere in the documentation. The only place that ProStar
is mentioned is on the front cover of the Windows 98 certificate of
authenticity.

The user's manual itself is kind of sparse but well written and
understandable. It covers the basics, like "do not throw the computer
into a fire", "do not touch power cord by wet hand", and my personal
favorite, "do not touch the poisonous liquid when the LCD is broken",
illustrated by a picture of a magma flow of LCD fluid creeping towards
a crying baby. It also includes a pretty good section on removing and
replacing various components of the computer, such as the hard drive,
memory, CPU, and CD-ROM.

The notebook computer comes with a CD-ROM containing drivers for the
various components, as well as two floppies, one containing video card
drivers and one containing sound card drivers. It appears to me that
these drivers are duplicated on the CD-ROM and I don't quite understand
why they are included on floppy also.

And as I mentioned before, you get the official Windows 98 CD-ROM that
you were forced to pay for along with the certificate of authenticity and
Windows 98 user's manual.

Installing Linux

As I mentioned previously, I wanted my notebook to be dual boot
between Windows 98 (for games) and Linux (for everything else). The
machine came with two partitions: the first approximately 80
megabytes, tagged with partition ID 84 and dedicated to the "suspend
to disk" feature. The second partition took up the rest of the hard
drive and was tagged with partition ID c, which is Windows 98 VFAT. I
noticed one interesting fact about the partitioning: the first
partition started at block 2 rather than block 1; block 1 was
unused and I never did figure out why the initial setup was like this.

I first used Ctrl-Alt-S during boot up to enter the (very easy to use)
BIOS setup screen and set the second boot device to be the CD-ROM drive,
with the floppy being first and the hard drive being third. Then I
put my Linux System LabsRedHat5.2
CD-ROM into the drive and
rebooted. The RedHat installation process booted from the CD-ROM as
expected and I was in business.

I've installed RedHat many times before and this particular instance
was just as easy as all of the others. I used fdisk to partition the
disk as follows:

Note that it's VERY IMPORTANT to size the suspend-to-disk
partition correctly. At first I thought that I only needed 68 MB (64 for
system memory and 4 for video memory) but this caused suspend-to-disk
to fail and I had to go back and repartition my drive and reinstall
everything. I ended up going with 82 megs because it was just slightly
bigger than the size of the suspend-to-disk partition that came with
the laptop. I have no idea whether or not I could have used a smaller
partition or how much would be needed for, say, a 128 Megabyte system
memory laptop, but 82 works great for my 64 MB + 4 megs video RAM
system.

It took me about 10 minutes to go through all of the RedHat packages
individually and select only those that I thought I would use. Then I
set the installation process in motion and about 20 minutes later
everything was installed. There's not much to say about this that
isn't covered in the RedHat documentation; the installation went very
smoothly. One important note: BE SURE TO MAKE A BOOT DISK. It
will save your butt if you run into problems. Also, if you install
Windows 98 second (as I did), you will need the boot disk to boot
Linux and re-run LILO as Windows 98 will arrogantly blow LILO off the
boot sector.

Configuring XFree86

The ProStar 3203T (and possibly all current ProStar models) includes
an S3Virge/MX video card and
4 MB video RAM. This means that you can
do true color (24 bit) at 1024x768 with room to spare which the
X server will use for Pixmap caching
and other performance enhancements. You could conceivably do 32 bpp
also, but apparently the release of
XFree86 that comes with RedHat 5.2
(XFree86 3.3.2.3) has problems
with 32 bpp with this video card. I tried 32 bpp and found things to
be very strange - the X server didn't seem to be able to erase any
part of the screen, just overwrite, and alot of stuff was compressed
into the top line of the display. Anyway, 24 bpp works great, the
only problem being that some programs don't run at 24 bpp, for example
xearth.

I found an XF86Config file on the 'net in a usenet posting by
Alex Blamey.
I have him to thank for my working X setup, which works great. I modified
his setup a bit, so you can blame any problems
my XF86Config file gives you on me personally.

Recompiling the Kernel

Next I did what any true Linux enthusiast does when presented with a
fresh-off-the-CD installation: I recompiled the kernel to match my
hardware requirements.

My /usr/src/linux/.config file shows in
gory detail the options I chose when configuring the kernel. Here are
some quick notes about configuring the kernel for a ProStar 3203T:

As with any installation, always say YES to all of the
loadable module options

I haven't compiled a.out support into a kernel in about a year and a
half and I haven't run into any problems

You don't need any of the chipset fixes (CMD640, RZ1000, etc) so
don't bother compiling them in

I have only been compiling ext2, ISO9660, proc, and the FAT series
(FAT, VFAT, etc) of filesystems into my Linux kernels for about 2
years now and I have never needed any of the others

You'll want only PS/2 mouse support

Be sure to say yes to the APM support (CONFIG_APM), and the
appropriate APM sub-options, to allow your kernel to cooperate with
the Advanced Power Management system of the ProStar 3203T

I bought a license to the
Open Sound System a couple of
years ago and have never needed to compile sound into the kernel
since, although I usually have to download a new version of OSS
when a new kernel comes along

As far as compiling the kernel goes, I do the following:

cd /usr/src/linux
make clean ; make dep ; make zImage ; make modules ; make modules_install

This takes less than 4 minutes on my laptop, a far cry from the hour or so
it used to take on my 486 laptop.

After the kernel has been built, the new kernel should be copied from
/usr/src/linux/arch/i386/boot/zImage to /boot/vmlinuz-2.0.36. You will
then need to edit /etc/lilo.conf to point it to that kernel and rerun
lilo. Note that naming your kernel vmlinuz-2.0.36 will not conflict with
RedHat's kernel-2.0.36-7 package, which is good.

This moves /usr/local and /home onto my /data partition. I like to
keep all of my "personal" stuff on one separate partition, to make
backups and archiving easier.

Add /usr/games/fortune at the end of /etc/profile so all logins get a
fortune

Get rid of the annoying alias of rm and friends in /root/.bashrc,
/root/.cshrc, and /root/.tcshrc

Stress Testing

In order to stress test the system (something I like to do with every
system I build/buy), I kept the CPU load at about 4 overnight, by running
each of the following in a separate xterm:

while true; do find /usr \! -type d -exec wc -l {} \;; done

cd /usr/src/linux ; while true; do make clean; make dep; make zImage; done

/usr/X11/lib/xscreensaver/vines

/usr/X11/lib/xscreensaver/kumppa

top (just to monitor everything else)

The system performed this task without problem for 8 hours.
At this point I decided that the system was stable.

Battery Life

Battery life is, as far as I can tell, and with somewhat limited experience,
phenomenal. I went through one battery in about 2:40 using Windows 98
with all power saving features disabled. With
Linux and power saving features enabled I
am looking at 4+ hours per battery. I suspect that Windows 98 with power
saving features enabled would come pretty close to what I get with
Linux. One thing that might be saving me
some extra battery life with Linux is
that I typically run all of my programs under X11 as white-on-black, so
that most
of my screen at any given time is black. I don't know if this makes any
difference but I am getting extremely good battery life with
Linux and there has to be some reason, aside from Linux's general
awesomeness.

Heat

Quite simply, as long as you have
cpuidle
for Windows, this laptop is
extremely cool in a thermal sense. With
Linux it's at least as cool,
possibly slightly cooler, than Windows with cpuidle. As I write this
I have been running the laptop for about 2 hours with
Linux and the
fan has not come on once. The underside of the case is slightly warm,
perfectly comfortable to the touch, but not even remotely "hot".
I did notice that when I was using Windows before I got cpuidle it
got quite a bit warmer (but still not hot), but now that I have cpuidle
it stays cool under Windows too.

Update: I have found that when playing full-screen games under
Windows, the CPU can actually run pretty hot. The notebook starts to get
uncomfortably warm after about 5 minutes and eventually the computer
may switch itself off because of the heat (about half an hour to 45
minutes into playing the game). One interesting thing is that the fan
never came on after the processor started getting hot. I don't know why
this happened, and I am currently investigating the issue.

Update: I have been informed that there is a BIOS update
available on the Kapok web site which fixes the "fan never comes in
in power saving mode even when the laptop gets hot" issue. It also
allows Windows 95 to recognize and use the Infrared port. You can
download it here. While
you're there you may want to check for other updates to drivers for
this system. Kapok seems to be pretty good about staying on top
of driver fixes and providing them via their web pages.

Battery Management Under Linux

Battery management under Linux is not
quite as slick as under Windows 98 but just as functional.

First and foremost you must compile APM support into the kernel. Next
you must make sure to install the apmd package which will give you the
apmd daemon and the apm and xapm utilities. You may choose to run the
apmd daemon to generate warnings when the battery is low; I prefer to
actively monitor the battery with apm. Apm will also let you suspend
or suspend-to-disk your system.

One important caveat about suspending the
ProStar 3203T under Linux:
DO NOT suspend while in X. X has alot of problems coming back
from suspend and suspend-to-disk. Usually the problems are not fatal
and you can still reboot your system by typing blindly to a black
display, but it's no fun.

Your best bet with the suspend functions is to switch to another VC
(ctrl-alt-f1 works fine) before you do the suspend, then switch
back to X (ctrl-alt-f7 usually) when you power back up.

Update: There is a newer version of XFree86, 3.3.3, that may
fix the suspend-resume problems that I have been experiencing. I
will add a note here describing the effects of upgrading to 3.3.3 once
I have done so.

Problems

One of the biggest actual complaints I have about the notebook is that
it is hard to figure out and set up the power management features.
Your BIOS options are basically to select a timeout value for the disk
spindown, a timeout value for global suspend, and that's about it. I
guess the rest is supposed to be left up to the OS, which is supposed
to control things via the APM API, but it's not always obvious to me
what's causing the screen to blank or the hard disk to spin down or
park its head. X has a screen blanking timeout, as do
Linux virtual consoles, and hdparam
can supposedly be set up to spin down the hard disk after a period of
inactivity.

Another complaint is that when you have about 2% battery left, the notebook
starts beeping VERY LOUDLY and in about 20 seconds or so automatically puts
the machine in suspend-to-disk mode. It's not the automatic suspend-to-disk
I mind - I actually like that, as a safety feature in case the machine is
about to run out of power unattended. It's the annoying, extremely loud,
unadjustable beeping that drives me crazy. I'd like to be able to turn
the beep off, or at least down, but I don't think that you can.

Linux-Specific Problems

Mostly suspend related. Simply do not suspend or suspend to disk while
in X; switch to a text VC first and you will have no problems.

I haven't even tried setting up the PCMCIA services for this computer
so I have no idea if there would be any problems there, although I
seriously doubt it given how well everything else has gone.

Windows-Specific Problems

Windows is stupid and doesn't use the HALT instruction to power down your
CPU while it's idle. This means that your laptop will run hotter and
with less battery life under Windows, unless you get a program
like
cpuidle,
which makes Windows behave like any intelligent OS would.
With cpuidle, the laptop runs with Windows nearly as coolly as Linux.
Funny that you need a $15 shareware program to get Windows to run the
way any intelligent company would have made it run in the first place.
Oh well, that's Microsoft
"quality" engineering for you.

Niggles

Here are some things I don't like about the notebook, although their
importance is minor, and some of them are problems that probably all
laptops have, due to their smaller size:

The ProStar 3203T does not have a caps lock indicator light. Not
a big deal but it is a little annoying when you are in caps lock
mode and don't realize what's going on at first.

The keyboard is not well optimized for emacs users. The control key
is not the leftmost key in the bottom row, as it should be, and it's
also quite small and hard to find. If Microsoft hadn't forced the
stupid useless "windows" key on us, there'd be plenty of room.

Under Linux the hard disk seems to
be constantly parking its head, then unparking, then parking again.
I think this stems from the way Linux flushes its filesytem
buffers; I've read that playing with some of the system timeouts and
such can improve the situation at the expense of making the filesystem
slightly more likely to have errors in the event of a crash. Note
that Windows also suffers from this parking-unparking-parking-again
tediousness but it's not as bad, probably due to an inferior
filesystem buffer algorithm in Windows.Update: I have followed the instructions in the
Battery Powered Linux Mini-HOWTO regarding changing system settings
to reduce disk activity, and his problem is now almost completely gone.

The top part of the notebook, that the LCD is in, is actually wider and
longer than the bottom part. I usually expect laptops to be basically
flattened-brick-shaped, with the top and bottom halves lining up. But
the ProStar 3203T with a 14.1 inch display actually has some "hang-over"
of the top part, about a fifth of an inch on either side and a quarter
of an inch in the front. This is not a problem per se but I find it
weird from a visual standpoint and slightly disconcerting to my
right-angle sense of style.

The volume control does not have any kind of display to indicate the
volume level. Also, the volume through the headphone jack is much higher
than through the speakers, making it annoying to have to switch volumes
constantly when going from headphones to speakers and back.

The touchpad, although extremely easy to use and with great tactile
feedback, is a little too sensitive and easy to bump with the thumb
while typing. I occasionally tap it accidentally and not until a little
too late do I realize that I've clicked somewhere I didn't mean to.

As you can see, these are all extremely minor points and don't really
detract from the general excellence of the machine.

Conclusion

Aside from some minor power management issues, I am 100% satisfied with
this notebook. Whereas I was hoping to find that it was a decent notebook
for a great price, I have been pleasantly suprised to find that it is
an incredible notebook for a great price. I would recommend a ProStar
(Kapok OEM) notebook highly.

Believe it or not, I used this notebook computer pretty regularly for nearly
six years - from December 1998 until August 2004. As of this writing
(08/14/2004) I have just receive my first new laptop computer since the last
millennium: a
Panasonic Toughbook T2.

I would have bought another ProStar but they just don't have any
models which I like anymore. I chose the T2 to buy and use
temporarily while I wait for the
Panasonic Toughbook Y2 to become more widely available and less
expensive; I expect to buy one within the next 6 months and pass the
T2 on down to my wife to replace her Sony PCG-505TS (which is also
quite long in the tooth, being of about the same vintage (late 1998)
as my ProStar). The Y2 is one sweet
notebook (and the T2 is pretty nice too) but I am going to miss my
trusty old 3203T.

Here is a history of life with my ProStar 3203T:

December 1998 - April 2000

For about a year and a half my ProStar saw pretty regular use twice a
day as I commuted on the train between our apartment in Yonkers and my
job in Manhattan. Mostly I ran Linux and hacked around on personal
software development projects. Sometimes I played some Windows games
also. I briefly experienced a technical problem wherein if I
accidentally applied pressure to the back left corner of the notebook
in a certain way , the laptop would spontaneously reboot. This was
annoying as it occurred several times per week (and this was before
the days of journalled filesystems on Linux, so fsck'ing after the
reboot took a long time). I called ProStar about this problem, but
they had no clue. Anyway, it seemed to fix itself eventally because
once I stopped that commute, I never had that problem again.

At any rate, the laptop survived a year and a half of tough commutes
on New York City metro transit (trains and subways), without any
ill effects.

April 2000 - December 2000

This was the time period when I used this laptop the least. It mostly
languished completely unused on my bookshelf during this 8 month
period. We had moved to Manhattan and my daily commute was now on
foot; I never bothered to take my laptop with me to work and had no
reason to use it otherwise. I sometimes looked over at it on my
bookshelf and felt a little sad as I watched it collect dust month
after month.

In December 2000, we started making preparations for our then upcoming trip
to Asia. You can read about that
here. I had planned to take my
ProStar 3203T laptop computer with me to be my sole computer during my
time in China. So before we left I decided to upgrade the processor
to try to get enough performance to satisfy me over the course of the
next 10 months overseas. I did some research and found that I would
be able to upgrade the processor to an AMD K6-2+/500 or AMD K6-III+/
500, but that due to bus and multiplier issues (the laptop has a 66
Mhz bus as opposed to a 100 Mhz bus as expected by those processors)
the processor clock speed would be limited to 400 Mhz. The K6-III+
was much more expensive and hard to obtain than the K6-2+ so I bought
a K6-2+/500 and underclocked it to 400 Mhz. This was still an
improvement over the 300 Mhz K6-2 that came with the notebook, both in
clock rate, and in cache, which the K6-2+ had more of than the K6-2.
This provided a nice increase in performance while reducing the
power usage and heat generation due to the better thermal
characteristics of the underclocked K6-2+.

January 2001 - October 2001

My 3203T went with me everywhere all over Asia in 2001. I used it as
my sole computer while in China, and during our "home stays" in
Beijing I worked on personal software projects extensively using this
laptop. When we travelled to other Asian countries for two or three
week trips, I took the ProStar with me as a place to offload images
from our digital camera, and also something to play games on. I had
my best gaming experience with this laptop playing the PC version of
Metal Gear Solid while we were in Thailand.
I lugged this laptop around in my backpack through the Tiger Leaping
Gorge, took it with me while visiting many Asian cities, and
carried it on a boat down
the Yangtze River, among many other places.

I also used this laptop extensively for editing our digital camera photos
and for uploading those photos to my server in the USA over a very sloooow
dialup connection at our apartment in Beijing. For 9 months this laptop was
my regular connection to the internet and thus the world at large.

October 2001 - June 2002

After returning from Asia, I was hired at TiVo and during this time period used
my laptop very sparingly. I had no internet connectivity at my
parents-in-law's house where I was staying at the time, and little
other reason to fire the laptop up. But at this time I upgraded the
hard drive from its initial 4 GB model to the 6 GB model that came out of
my wife's laptop which had lived just barely long enough to make it
back from Asia. I tore her laptop apart, used the bigger hard drive
from it for my laptop, and sold the remaining pieces of her laptop on
eBay for parts.

June 2002 - August 2004

In June 2002 my wife started her residency program in New York City. I
retained my job in California and thus have spent the past two years
travelling back and forth between the east coast and west coast; typically
I spend 4 - 6 weeks on one coast and then return to the other for 4 - 6
weeks. I've used my laptop extensively during this period both for personal
software development projects, both in California where I have no other
computer as I still stay at my in-laws' house while I am there, and during
those long coast-to-coast plane flights.

I really started to feel the drawbacks of this laptop as these last two
years have rolled on. For starters, a 400 Mhz K6-2+ with 128 MB of memory
just isn't very fast at all compared to today's CPUs and memory. I have
been completely unable to play anything but simple games on this laptop
since about two years ago; modern games have simply moved beyond the
capabilities of the ProStar 3203T. Also, I installed RedHat 9 and found that
it was very slow with only 64 MB of memory. I did upgrade the memory to
128 MB, which helped alot, but nothing is going to change the fact that
this laptop is simply inadequate for modern computing purposes. Also, it's
big and bulky, and requires two big and bulky batteries to make it through a
coast-to-coast flight; I've struggled with its bulk and weight at every
airport security check and it's a pain to carry around in a backpack.

All of these factors together finally convinced me to get a new laptop.
Even so, 5 years and 8 months' use isn't too bad for a laptop, and with
zero major problems!

Final Thoughts

I really loved my ProStar 3203T and I'm sad to be finished with it. It
was an incredibly dependable laptop and served me well for almost 6 years.
As a final ode to this laptop, here's a picture of the keyboard after nearly
6 years of use. Notice how many keys have had their letter completely
rubbed off!

Footnote

I ended up giving the laptop away for free to a nice person in Romania who
wrote asking some technical questions about it (he had a similar model and
was having some problems - mostly he was missing an AC power cord and was
trying to fabricate his own charger!). As we discussed his problems I
realized that they could be solved if I just gave him my old laptop, which I
did. Getting it through customs for him was a bit of a nightmare, but
eventually it came through and he's been using it ever since. I'm very happy
to know that my trusty old laptop is still chugging away out there somewhere.